Just recently it's been on my mind that optimization and editing get conflated as though they are the same thing.

Asking a question in my Facebook group confirmed that.

"If you had a list of all your URLs and you could pick 5-10 metrics to help identify which pieces of content need editing what would they be?"

They're not wrong about this being important, but in this industry little things you add or remove from your processes can make all the difference when it comes to thousands of dollars more in monthly revenue.

There's another reason people don't think about why this isn't enough.

Content metrics don't get considered as important because most people don't see editing as more than running something through Grammarly.

You've got to look at the things that Grammarly doesn't consider to get the best results.

This doesn't mean traffic or rankings. It shouldn't stop there.

Because what does that actually tell you needs work?

It doesn't help prioritize what to work on. It doesn't tell you where the issues are.

We also can't ignore the obvious fact that sitewide algorithms have existed for a long time now.

There are lots of sitewide things that do matter and can help.

This site struggled for months and eventually benefited massively from a content-metric approach.

It helped me find a pattern of weak areas and improve them.

These metrics become as much about helping with decision-making as anything else.

Here are a few of the metrics I'm gathering with Python to help automate my decision-making process.

Word count vs adjusted word count.

If you have 2,000 words and only 800 words once you've removed stop words? That's not a good sign. Ratios like this can be important.

Reading grade

People love to talk about averages, but what about reading grades? If most people can't read above ninth-grade level then that's a good place to start. However, you can always find out the average for your niche.

Long paragraphs

Long paragraphs can be a bad thing for lots of reasons. You should avoid using too many in an article and the ones you do have should be well optimized.

So long as you know to develop a process for identifying content on your site that needs work then you can pick any number of metrics to look at.

If something doesn't help you'll soon find out and then remove it from your process.

- Traffic/rankings

- Content metrics

- Last modified date

These should all be in there somewhere if you're serious about publishing.

Just don't forget to take the content seriously, because after all, you are in the content business.